Fourteen Seconds
by MajesticMoments
Summary: He'd lose himself within each tick of the clock. His heart racing, his skin flush, his eyes open wide but unseeing. Something would grip him by the neck and he'd find himself unable to breathe, unable to swallow. A lump stuck in his throat as he waited. [Sherlock-centric, Sherlolly, post-S4]


Ideas come and I have to get them out.

Fourteen seconds is in reference to the final 14 seconds that appeared on the clock during the coffin scene after he already said i love you and was waiting for Molly to respond.

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 _Disclaimer: I do not own these characters or the scenes referenced to. They belong to ACD & BBC Sherlock. The story is my own._

* * *

 **Fourteen Seconds**

It took him a while to understand. To realize its far-reaching depths. The implications.

He looks to her over the microscope. She's pipetting. Measuring. Slowly adding agents to patient lab work for her research. She's meticulous. Her nose scrunched in careful concentration. Her gaze serious and controlled as she holds the micropipette, careful with each drop as she runs her thumb over the dial click by click.

He hears the clearing of a throat next to him. Turning to see John who caught him in a moment of distraction, a knowing look on his face. He only rolls his eyes as he takes the paper, John's smile only becoming larger as he walks back to his seat. Ever since John figured it out he was seemingly hyper-aware of _any_ moment he shared with the pathologist. John always at the ready to remark. To give him a look. A smirk. It was bothersome. He realized his friend, John Watson, had a strange fascination of just watching him squirm under scrutiny. In a place he once deemed _not really his area_.

Looking to the paper John gave him, his eyes hovered over John's scribbled notes in the margins of the report, reading the lines of interest. Then he realizes his gaze has shifted to her again. This time she's labeling agars, preparing them for cultures. Lined up in neat rows across the bench, in sets of five. Because she only ever works in groups of five.

And then she stops. He knows what will happen. He's been waiting for this. The way her posture changes as she thinks about something, contemplating. His gaze never leaves her. Because he knows it will come.

Then it happens. She looks to him, briefly. Her eyes catching his, just for a moment. Her eyes wide in alarm because he caught her. Then she looks away. A small smile now on her face. A slight blush dusting her cheeks. He reveled in those moments because it always came as a surprise to her. That when she'd peek a glance at him, he'd already be looking.

She won't look back again. Not for a while. Cause she'd been caught. Her heart rate elevated.

His success is short lived, however, when he remembers they're not alone. He throws a quick glance to John, thankful he's still looking through documents.

And for the moment, he's working again. Looking through the lens of the microscope, using the knobs to adjust the stage. Watching as red blood cells become clearer in the field. Polycythemia, he notes, congruent with the lab workup. Their victim being an athlete, given the age, his physique. Probability indicated an illegal use of erythropoietin. A possible reason for motive on the part of the guilty. He sets the thought to the side. Electing to wait for more evidence.

Its a simple case, he knows. A two, at best. But there are lulls, even in his work. When nothing of interest would come. So what better way to help Greg than by staying in the lab. The alternative was staying at home. Bored. At least she was here, and he was nearby. It was calming.

She noticed these changes. She always did. But she never commented on them. Knowing he needed this. Understanding. She would just smile when he arrived, happily taking the tea he'd bring for her, leaving a small kiss to his temple as he sat down at his stool ready to work.

He told her what had transpired _that_ infamous day. Start to finish.

But the details. The implications of what that day meant, the secrets that had been dug out. He told her bit by bit. Little by little overtime. There was so much. His adventures with Victor. How he had looked up to his brother in reverence. About his sister and her reservations. About John and Mycroft and what he was prepared to do… About the circumstances that brought about a premature 'i love you'. And what happened after.

He didn't leave anything out.

She said he always knew. That _she_ always knew. That in his own time he would have figured it out. Maybe not tomorrow, or next week, or next year. But he would have gotten there. And she would have waited. Her patience unyielding.

But he wasn't convinced. He's a stubborn man after all.

Sometimes the feeling would be subtle. And sometimes it was consuming. It would overwhelm him like a wave, a tide that wouldn't subside, ebbing there, at the cusp of his heart.

 _Doubt_. Doubt about the one thing he can never be certain of.

Each time. He'd find himself downstairs, rummaging through cabinets and bookshelves in the dark of night before he even realizes he's no longer in bed. Standing in the midst of a mess he doesn't remember creating. Searching for something that was long gone. Trying to control an outcome that was always out of his reach. Even for him.

Fourteen seconds.

He'd lose himself within each tick of the clock. His heart racing, his skin flush, his eyes open wide but unseeing. Something would grip him by the neck and he'd find himself unable to breathe, unable to swallow. A lump stuck in his throat as he waited.

His intellect was reliable. Unchangeable. Unmoving. His mind quick and sharp. He craved the challenges, just to prove those facts alone. If there was anyone he could rely upon, it was himself. He wholeheartedly believed this once. Now, not so much. He could get himself out of any situation. A step ahead most of the time. But not about this.

Those final fourteen seconds. They haunted him.

Each trial until the third, it was his intellect that solved the puzzle. Each one easy. Each challenge not desirable but still solvable.

But the third, the third was when he realized that his intellect alone wasn't enough. That _he_ wasn't enough. He couldn't rely on himself then. It was a challenge unparalleled, unlike any other. Life and death suddenly so interchangeable and he couldn't direct its target.

The thought would plague him. Overwhelm him with worry. He'd be outside, hands gliding along the perimeter of the building before he's realizes its night and he's barefoot standing in the flower bed of the neighbors garden. Searching for something that was never there. It took him months to realize that it wasn't the cameras he searched for. That he'd taken care of it that first night.

She'd come find him when she realized he was no longer in bed. The chill of the night and his warmth gone that woke her. Worry etched across her face as she approached him. Hesitant to touch him because he was a crazed man, searching. In a moment of desperation, to pull him from his nightmare, she asked him, yelling, what it was he always searched for. And in his heightened state, he realized he was searching for the explosives that were never there.

Destructive objects that had blinded his thoughts, that made him face what had been in him for some time but refused to acknowledge. It was irrational. But he needed to find them. To stop them. To make sense of the moment that caused him so much despair when he realized he could lose something he never had.

He knew then, in that moment, in the trial as he stood before the screen. As he watched her in their kitchen, the timer ticking. That there would come a time when he wouldn't be enough. His mind, that he had always trusted to get him out of situations, couldn't get him out of that moment. Because he had to wait. He had to rely on someone other than himself. Because that's what it was to love. He had to trust.

He feels her hand come around his face. Against his cheek. And he'd hear her whisper the three words that he always waited for. His saving grace in those final five seconds as the timer stopped at two. The words said in time but not soon enough.

A relief unlike any other.

He grabs the hand that holds the right side of his face. Holding it there as he feels the familiarity of the ring on her finger against his cheek and beneath his hand. The slight swell of her belly pressed against his side, as she wraps her other arm around him. Holding him. Staying there until he can breathe again.

He always trusted her. She always counted.

If John noticed these moments, he never said a word. A man already plagued by the unfairness of life and how easily it could change. John never mocked him. Never about this.

He'd spend every day for the rest of his life trying to be what she deserved, even when he thinks it isn't enough.

He took comfort in the fact that she married him and that she must have had a reason.

* * *

It hit me the other night that a lot of the anxiety Sherlock felt in those moments in the 'i love you' is that he couldn't change the outcome. For the first time in those series of trials, and probably in the series, he had to rely on someone else other than himself in a matter that was personal for him. I don't think he's had to deal with something like that before. He always had an out. And this time, he didn't, no secondary plan, if Molly didn't say the passcode, then it was over. The timer stopped at 2 seconds when she finally said it.

The ending line is in reference to TAB. When they're speaking to Eustace Carmicheal. I always felt that his remarks to him about his wife being an intelligent woman of rare perception was in reference to Molly. There is no real evidence for it but I like the fact that he remarked on their marriage in a manner that indicated that she was too good for him. Because he obviously had an opinion about it. And that is how I feel he would think about his relations to Molly. That Molly is too good for him.


End file.
